What are version backups and why should your online business care?

Allow me to share a story with you. One morning I get a call for a client of mine. A website they were maintaining had bad been hacked. The service they were providing was not working anymore and they were losing the trust of their customers. They were asking me to fix it for them.

Fixing a hacked website is very difficult and time-consuming and it can mean a lot of downtime. The better option was to restore the site to a previous state when everything was working.

Thankfully this client understood the value of backups so he had one. Took me an hour to restore the backup. And when we checked the site…

Surprise!

It was still looking bad and the browser was still issuing security complaints. Auch!!

It became clear that the hack had happened a more than a week ago, so restoring the most recent backup did us no good.

And here come the versioned backups. Which is a fancy name for backups that go back in time. You don’t have only the latest backups, you have a daily backup for the last 30 days or a weekly backup for the last 10 weeks.

Because we had those I was able to discover when the hack took place and restore the backup before this. Another 2 hours spent, but now the website was working again.

After one more hour, I discovered that one of the plugins installed had a security flaw that had been exploited. I had to disable and delete that plugin or the site would have been hacked again shortly.

Versioned backups are snapshots of your website across time where you keep more than just the last one.

As you can see, this allows you to reach back in time to when “things were working” and restore your data in case of trouble, even if you discover the issue a few days after the fact.

Why should your online business care about versioned backups?

If your website is mostly static and you don’t offer any services online then you don’t need versioned backups. Just an old backup from last year will do the job.

But let’s be honest. Most websites are in fact web-applications. Meaning they are not just static pages. There is content that is updated, products that are promoted, customer lists, fulfilled orders, and invoices. And if you are doing well, these get updated at least once a day. So a backup from last year will help, but you will still lose a lot of your data.

Depending on how you run your online business and the amount of online activity you will have to decide how often to backup and for how long to keep a backup history.

In my experience so far, with small and medium-sized businesses, doing weekly backups and keeping only the last 4 works very well. This means that in the worst-case scenario you can go back a month, and in the best-case scenario you lose a week of your data: new posts, customers and sales.

But I am paranoid and what I usually do is daily backups that I keep for 2 or 3 months.

Lots of backups and a long history sounds good a reassuring. But there is a cost to that in time and resources. Your server needs to work (sometimes hard) to generate the backup, and then you need the storage space to keep al that history. That is why you need to strike a balance between your real business needs and your peace of mind.

The Take-Away

Versioned backups are a good form of insurance because sometimes the ‘latest backup’ is just as bad as the live website.